A mattress label in Illinois led to a short-lived ghost scare this month after a mother noticed it on her baby monitor. You can’t blame her: In the dark and shadowy blue of the camera, the label, which featured the image of a laughing baby, appeared hauntingly transparent, as if there were a second ‘ghost’ baby in the crib.
When she checked the crib the next morning, she eventually found the truth. “So last night I was positive there was a ghost baby in the bed with my son,” she shared on Facebook, “Well, this morning I go to investigate a bit further. It turns out my husband just forgot to put the mattress protector on when he changed the sheets.”
While this incident has been used as an example of how we should always look for other possible explanations before turning to ghosts, this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered potential supernatural activity captured by baby monitors. Just this year, there have been at least a few reports of such strangeness.
Other Baby Monitor Ghosts In the News
In August, many websites covered the story of a Cocoon Cam baby monitor that picked up some colorful humanoid figures, which appeared to float over a sleeping infant. The pink and purple colors on the camera app were meant to represent motion, and yet no one else was present in the room at the time.
According to the Daily Mail, while Cocoon Cam’s marketing chief believed the anomaly was due to improper installation of the monitor, others, such as paranormal investigator Joshua P. Warren, felt there may have been “ghostly activity” involved.
Another news report in March, one that was perhaps a bit more troubling, highlighted the story of a family in Highland, Michigan who found themselves haunted by what they believed may have been a paranormal entity. Captured on their own nanny cam was the appearance of a ghostly figure walking in the room while the baby sat in her crib. The baby, meanwhile, pulled herself up as if she, too, saw the specter.
“It was chilling,” the father recalled after seeing the footage. While watching the ghostly figure herself, the baby’s mother ran upstairs into the room and grabbed her daughter, though no one else was present.
She also claimed the ghost allegedly scratched her daughter. What’s more, she woke up one morning herself to the feeling of some invisible force with its hands around her own neck.
To add even more to the strange story, the baby’s grandfather did some research on the house, and discovered that its original owner may have committed suicide by jumping out of the very window in the baby’s room.
“It’s not physically just going after her,” the mother told 7 Action News at the time, “It feels like it’s going after myself, too.”
There were other cases. In July, camera footage showed what appeared to be a “ghost orb” floating above a crib, followed by the baby’s feet being pulled by an unseen force. The Daily Star suggested that the orb itself was the culprit, perhaps the manifestation of a spirit.
“I’m 96% sure we caught a ghost on camera, pulling on my almost-two-year-old son’s leg this morning while he was sleeping in his crib,” the child’s father shared on Facebook.
Perhaps similar to the mattress label ghost, there was another story from 2016, in which a mother in Victoria, Australia witnessed what she believed to be a ‘ghost baby’ (or two) sleeping next to her daughter in her crib. In this case, the alleged ghosts appeared as transparent mist-like figures gliding from side to side.
The mother watched the ‘spirits’ for 20 minutes before finally checking on her daughter, only to find the room otherwise empty and perfectly fine. When she returned to the monitor, the strange figures had gone. She reasoned that she had “disturbed” them away, according to a story by the Daily Express.
Witnesses Share Their Own Stories
But that’s hardly the last of the baby monitor apparitions.
A cursory look on social media and various forums reveals that many have witnessed unexplained figures and even captured EVPs through their baby monitors.
A thread over at City-Data.com, originally started in 2012, has many individuals who have claimed to have seen or heard various anomalous things on baby monitors over the years, including this video of alleged ghost orbs circling over a mother and her son.
Head over to Reddit’s r/Paranormal, and you’ll likewise find no end of people sharing their tales of possible ghosts and whispers captured by their home cameras.
One Redditor recalled a night he’d been waiting for his wife to return home from work, when suddenly he thought he heard her speaking to his son on their baby monitor. He turned on the monitor’s screen, and saw what he thought was his wife’s back to the camera. His son was talking to her. He turned off the monitor and waited, but when she never entered the bedroom, he began to wonder. “I suddenly got a feeling of dread,” he wrote, “I picked up my phone and checked her location. It was still at work.”
He checked the house, and all the doors, and his son’s and daughter’s bedrooms. No one else was there. He then asked his son if he’d seen his mother in his room, and he said, “No.” But what he did claim to see shocked the father to his core:
“I asked him who that was talking to him and he said ‘I don’t know. Some kind of animal maybe. It was trying to play tricks on me.’”
In another case, a baby monitor may have captured an EVP of the user’s deceased grandfather. According to her story, she awoke one night because she heard her daughter crying through the monitor. But then the crying stopped, and the baby went back to sleep, and she suddenly heard an old, familiar voice.
“…Then I heard my grandads voice on the monitor…I remember him saying something like ‘You’re a very clever little lady aren’t you’.”
The Redditor thought it was all a strange dream at the time, but the next morning her partner claimed that he, too, had heard the voice of a man on the monitor.
How about a baby monitor capturing interactions with an imaginary friend (or, as some would perhaps claim, a demon)? Just this month, one user shared the tale of their 17-month-old daughter who would always wake up screaming whenever she’d go to sleep with the closet door open:
“When she’s in her room playing I can see her through the baby monitor playing with someone when I know she’s in there by herself. Sometimes she’ll even look in the corner of the room next to her closet and wave and say “hi’ or sometimes just stare until I snap her out of it.”
In yet another bizarre account, this one from the early 2000s, a whispering voice could be heard emanating from a baby monitor that had been placed in the room of the Redditor’s brother. The voice was “distinctly feminine,” he recounted, saying things like “hush little one” and “I’ll take care of you.” The father immediately ran into the room.
“My brother was wide awake, just standing in his crib. Some of his blankets were far across the room, out of throwing distance. Most notably the toys from the closet were EVERYWHERE. Thrown around all across the room and leaving the closet empty.”
They never could explain what happened that day, who the voice belonged to or just what had thrown the blankets and toys around the room.
This is similar to an encounter reported at City-Data, in which a father claimed that one night he could hear a woman’s voice on the family’s baby monitor speaking to his son, and yet his wife was asleep right next to him. “I went tearing down to the other end of the house full speed,” he wrote, “No one there except him, and he [was] sleeping soundly.”
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True paranormal or not, the appearance of strange anomalies on baby monitors seems to be a fairly common phenomenon. Even in the news story above about the Cocoon Cam, the company behind that product admitted that they’ve received many reports of similar strange figures by other users. Perhaps some of these are just glitches in the software, or the cameras picking up dust particles in the air.
On the other hand, you have stories involving ghostly scratches and what would seem to be paranormal entities physically interacting with the living, or disembodied voices speaking to children at night.
